Simon Benson (UK/NL)
Anita Groener (NL/IE)
Becoming / Unbecoming shows recent drawings by Anita Groener and Simon Benson. Focal points are two installation-like works, Anita's Fibonacci circle made ??up of paper silhouettes pinned to the wall, and Simon's cloud of drawings from the Verwandlung series.
The title of the exhibition sets the context of the work that is brought together in a dialogue: both artists live in another country, Simon as Englishman in the Netherlands and Anita as Dutch woman in Ireland, and it implies the ongoing process of becoming of both the artists and their work.
Each artist has set the task of remembering in their work, exploring questions around notions of identity, of home and culture, of the everyday phenomena that make real that what is virtual. Drawing, for both of them, is an uninterrupted activity that enables them to think about and record these questions.
The opening was performed by Diana Wind, director Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
Click here for the exhibition guide (in Dutch).
'You look and you look and you see more and more - and that is precisely the intention of a successful work of art of course. What a wonderful and fascinating work Groener has made here.'
Brabants Dagblad
Lost Painters - 02-02-2014
Bob Negryn Reduced Review - 03 02-2014
Brabants Dagblad - 27-02-14
Anita Groener makes paintings, drawings, monumental site-specific wall drawings, films and animations. Her practice explores the dialectic of home and displacement as situated within modern geopolitical realities. The current work engages with the complex of trauma and loss that constitutes the core of this dialogue. Seeking to capture the actuality of this lived experience she uses strategies and economies of drawing, as well as formal aspects of scale and monochromes. The work exhibited in Park is related to ‘State’, a three dimensional wall drawing she showed in Amsterdam, Brussels and Dublin last year. Our world is shown as a circular battlefield, littered with casualties: countless tiny figures, cut from black paper; walking, standing, kneeling, falling, lying down, but also working together and supporting each other. Upon close inspection each figure can be viewed as an individual, while all together, seen from a distance, look like a flock of starlings. Each individual disappears into the crowd and is also essential for the emergence of that same crowd.
Simon Benson’s work covers a large area; from installations, sometimes consisting solely of text, sometimes in which three dimensional works are combined with drawings, to presentations of just his drawings. His is not only a draughtsman of subjects like architecture, nature and the human figure in its various forms, portraits for example, but he also manages to combine these subjects with text in a distinctive way.
In “The Metamorphosis” / “Die Verwandlung” by Franz Kafka, young Gregor Samsa wakes up from a night of uneasy dreaming to find that he is transformed inexplicably into a large insect. For the series of drawings that he is showing in Park, Simon Benson has borrowed the beetle, as a symbol for transformation. Each page consists of one of his own drawings from twenty or more years ago, into which he has incorporated either a beetle, a beetle larvae or a text relating to Kafka’s story. It is solely the added element that is recent, the original drawing is unchanged. Each transformed drawing now becomes a new work, referring to the passing of time, bridging more than twenty years of his life.
